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The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

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Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#51

Post by eru »

whakim wrote: post #18

What a wild take. The straightforward takeaway from the end of ZIRP and the resulting increase in focus would be that you need to say no to more things, not fewer? You have to really contort yourself to argue that actually ZIRP gave rise to an entire class of make-work which then gave rise to a class of folks to keep said make-work under control.

The relevant era wasn't even a good example of (near) zero interest rates. At least when control for inflation. And there are other eras that also had low or even negative real interest rates.

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#52

Post by simianwords »

Ohhh man wait I have so much to say about the “just say no” engineer.

The "just say no" phenotype of engineers believe these things generally (from my experience)

- thinks cloud is a psyop by the big tech people to fool companies into being locked in

- thinks everything companies do is to fool the stock market and prop up stocks

- thinks tech ecosystem was at its peak during their time and ever since then it has become overly complicated mess

- thinks that AI is hyped and will just becoming a passing thing in a few months

- simultaneously believes both that no new features are required in their product because it complicates things but also thinks layoffs shouldn’t be done (what would employees do?)

- believes in conspiracy theories like “bullshit jobs” but doesn’t realise the irony

- believes in things like “enshittification” and is generally pessimistic about the state of tech

There are lots of good things about these engineers as well to be fair

- generally smarter in a narrow sense and can spot out unneeded complexity

- they are the people to go to for hard technical issues

- they do, to be fair, care about their code base which I see less in others

- though dogmatic at times with dev principles, they bring a father like pseudo wise vibe to the team that makes it feel like a family

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#53

Post by valleyer »

> It used to be that they only had to say no to more junior engineers’ handwritten PRs, but now they have to say no to a barrage of AI-generated code, some of it generated by managers and VPs who are politically difficult to say no to.

Holy cow. I worked at a big tech firm but left the industry prior to the emergence of InstructGPT et al., so I haven't experienced LLM code generation from the inside. Is this really happening -- upper managers and VPs proposing code changes they generated with LLMs? I don't think I'd survive.

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#54

Post by simonw »

valleyer wrote: post #53

> It used to be that they only had to say no to more junior engineers’ handwritten PRs, but now they have to say no to a barrage of AI-generated code, some of it generated by managers and VPs who are politically difficult to say no to. Holy cow. I worked at a big tech firm but left the industry prior to the emergence of InstructGPT et al., so I haven't experienced LLM code generation from the inside. Is this really h…

The CEO of Shopify is filing PRs against their public repos: https://github.com/Shopify/liquid/pull/2056

(To be fair, he did build liquid and much of Shopify himself at the start of the company so he's not exactly inexperienced, but still.)

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#55

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

praptak wrote: post #13

The problem with this kind of armchair economy is that you can argue both ways. "End of ZIRP and the raise of just-say-no engineers": with capital being more expensive companies need to invest it wisely, therefore the need the judgement of the just-say-no engineer to avoid blowing it on unnecessary stuff.

It's on stories like these where I honestly just love the HN community and the comment threads.

I was reading the article, and as it went on I increasingly thought "This is one of those articles that sounds like it's saying something insightful ('it has all the right lingo! ZIRP era! Just-say-no engineers!'), but then when you dig deeper, it doesn't resonate with my experience at all when I was knee deep in software engineering in those years, nor do I feel that it in any way accurately diagnoses the immense changes that are currently happening with AI." In other words, it sounds like buzzword bullshit to me, and in the absence of a downvote button on stories, I'm glad the community is calling it out.

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#56

Post by taurath »

> Tech companies are now more focused than at any time in the past two decades

Citation needed. In fact, I find the utter opposite - the pivots are happening hard and fast, planning is taking a major back seat, and it’s a ship with speed and look good and be visible at all costs mentality.

The truth is the guardrails are being ignored in the frenzy. Style is winning over substance. I think if you revisit this hot take in a year it’ll have aged so poorly it will seem like a parody.

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#57

Post by theteapot »

> having more engineers around was beneficial to the stock price ... When banks hiked interest rates ... It was just no longer profitable to keep a bloated engineering staff around to boost the stock price.

Erm, what's known of the mechanism coupling software engineer head count and stock price? Or is it just an empirically observed phenomena?

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#58

Post by frevib »

Code is a liability. Saying no is because the engineer wants to reduce complexity, not because she/ he is so subjectively “obsessed” with code quality. The term “quality” is nowadays misunderstood by management. It means the right amount of effort to build the product as fast and for as low as cost possible, taking into account a team of engineers that can easily add and modify code.

This description is the better one: https://www.nair.sh/guides-and-opinions/communicating-your-e...

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#59

Post by lynx97 »

I stopped saying No. If management wants to push stupid decisions, so be it. They are getting payed for strategic decisions. If their strategy is bullshit, so be it. If they tank the company, so be it. I am not getting payed for that kind of work. And the more bullshit I hear from upper levels, the less I identify with my company.

Re: The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

#60

Post by cornel_io »

taurath wrote: post #56

> Tech companies are now more focused than at any time in the past two decades Citation needed. In fact, I find the utter opposite - the pivots are happening hard and fast, planning is taking a major back seat, and it’s a ship with speed and look good and be visible at all costs mentality. The truth is the guardrails are being ignored in the frenzy. Style is winning over substance. I think if you revisit this hot tak…

That's what focus looks like to a just-say-yes engineer. They're just focused on shipping, not tinkering.
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